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Above all, that meant forming a new alliance with Saudi Arabia’s deputy crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman-known in the White House and throughout the Middle East as M.B.S. Bin Salman, though only thirty-one¸ was already one of the most powerful people in the kingdom. As Kushner grappled with the complexities of Middle East politics, he and M.B.S. began a conversation by telephone and e-mail. M.B.S. had his own ideas about how to remake the Middle East. Joseph Westphal, the U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia from 2013 to 2017, told me that whenever Salman introduced M.B.S. to a stranger he said, with evident pride, “This is my son.” Westphal recalled watching a video recorded when M.B.S. was a teen-ager, in which Salman visited an industrial plant with two of his sons, Faisal and M.B.S. Faisal, who is fifteen years older, walked passively, while M.B.S. asked questions and scribbled notes incessantly; Salman watched him and beamed. In a statement on June 5th, the Saudi government accused Qatar of “Dividing internal Saudi ranks, instigating against the state, infringing on its sovereignty, adopting various terrorist and sectarian groups aimed at destabilizing the region.” The same day, Saudi Arabia and the Emirates, along with Bahrain, announced that they were blockading Qatar and breaking off diplomatic relations. Soon after Kushner departed, M.B.S. held a meeting with Mahmoud Abbas, the leader of the Palestinian Authority, to discuss the prospects for peace in the Middle East. Hariri got the call as he was preparing for lunch with Françoise Nyssen, the French minister of culture, but he was not in a position to ignore M.B.S. Hariri was a Saudi citizen, and his construction company, Saudi Oger, which was deeply in debt, had done millions of dollars’ worth of projects for the Saudi state. A senior American official in the Middle East told me that the plot was “The dumbest thing I’ve ever seen.” But there were indications that M.B.S. had coördinated his moves with the Trump Administration, possibly at the summit in Riyadh.

Implicit bias diverts attention from more damaging instances of explicitbigotry. First, much of the controversy centers on the most famous implicit bias test, the Implicit Association Test. A majority of people taking this test show evidence of implicit bias, suggesting that most people are implicitly biased even if they do not think of themselves as prejudiced. None of these measures is without limitations, but they show the same pattern of reliable bias as the IAT. There is a mountain of evidence-independent of any single test-that implicit bias is real. Implicit bias researchers have always warned against using the tests for predicting individual outcomes, like how a particular manager will behave in job interviews-they’ve never been in the palm-reading business. Metro areas with greater average implicit bias have larger racial disparities in police shootings. Counties with greater average implicit bias have larger racial disparities in infant health problems. One reason people on both the right and the left are skeptical of implicit bias might be pretty simple: it isn’t nice to think we aren’t very nice.

Watching Tiger this spring reminded me of an old Roger Federer quote. A new Tiger biography released March 27, written by Jeff Benedict and Armen Keteyian, exhaustively details Tiger’s childhood, his meteoric rise and fall, scandals and all. “My goal all along had been that, by playing and winning golf, I could somehow help golfers, and perhaps people outside the game, be color blind,” Tiger wrote in the book “The 1997 Masters: My Story” co-written with Lorne Rubenstein. The second time Trump and Tiger played, “Get Out” director Jordan Peele retweeted a video of Trump and Tiger together with the caption “Now you’re in The Sunken Place” and the tweet went viral, but any controversy over the round quickly faded. The last thing anyone wants is to see Tiger double over pain at the 13th tee at the Masters because he has just seen Bubba Watson drive one over the trees and carry the dogleg and his ego can’t resist swinging so hard and Tiger reaches his breaking point. I recently spoke to Golf Channel analyst and occasional Tiger Woods skeptic Brandel Chamblee, and we were joking about what it’s like to be on the record, as both of us are, about how a Tiger comeback was unlikely. Rose: You don’t? Tiger: No. Rose: You’ve accepted that? Tiger: I’ve accepted I’m going to get more. Another generation of golf fans – my kids, your kids, Tiger’s kids – will get to witness some magic that seemed, not long ago, improbable.

Perfectionists are motivated to make the absolute best choice – even when doing so isn’t strictly necessary. Since perfectionists tend to ruminate over even tiny mistakes, they’re strongly motivated to attempt to recover situations involving sunk costs. Perfectionists can spend too long working on marginally productive activities before moving on. Perfectionists want to feel absolutely ready before taking on challenges. For the most part, perfectionists tend to apply their extremely rigorous standards to only themselves. One reason perfectionists are so strongly motivated to avoid small mistakes is because making them triggers their tendency to ruminate. Heuristics are a great method of prioritizing for perfectionists. Because perfectionists want to be flawless, they’re typically dismissive of incremental gains.

According to the Centre for Retail Research, more than 11,000 major high street outlets have gone bust since 2008, affecting almost 140,000 employees. What is certain is that the traditional high street of the last 50 years, founded on chain stores and well-known brands, is undergoing a brutal transformation. Less than a mile away, a stroll down Bishopthorpe Road reveals many of the elements that are on everyone’s wishlist for a decent local high street: a handful of excellent cafes and restaurants, hardware shop, chemist, baker, two greengrocers, a brace of small supermarkets, pub, bike shop, deli and butcher. The street was voted Britain’s best high street in 2015. What is really fascinating about this success is that it is not a glamorous location, a street laden with tourist attractions or backed by upmarket housing; it is a socially mixed area and, at first glance, a very ordinary British shopping street. “The measurements for success from engineers were about how many cars or people we could move through a space as quickly as possible. But there was very little conversation about how people actually use, enjoy and love streets, and how lingering should actually be a measurable definition of success for a great street.” In the past people went to the high street for shopping and work, just like today, but they also went for entertainment and leisure. Since then independent shops have moved in, accounting for 89% of retail growth, and making Ely high street a success story akin to York’s Bishopthorpe Road. Gehl’s influence is apparent in healthy cities all around the world.

Fresh Air: ‘Doing Harm’ By Maya Dusenbery : Shots – Health News Journalist Maya Dusenbery argues that medicine has a “Systemic and unconscious bias” against women that is rooted in “What doctors, regardless of their own gender, are learning in medical schools.” We still don’t know that women are necessarily adequately represented in all areas of research, because the NIH looks at the aggregate numbers, and the outside analyses that have been done show that women are still a little bit underrepresented. Even though women are usually included in most studies today, it’s still not the norm to really analyze results by gender to actually see if there are differences between men and women. Women are included, but we’re still not getting the knowledge we need about ways that their symptoms or responses to treatment might differ from men. On why some medicine affects men and women differently – and how that results in women receiving excessive doses of most drugs. So there’s been a concerted effort to go back and compare women’s experiences to men’s, which has led to the knowledge that women are more likely to have what are considered to be atypical symptoms. One study found it was younger women – so women under 55 – were seven times more likely than the average patient to be sent home mid-heart attack. So conditions like autoimmune diseases that really are marked by these subjective symptoms of pain and fatigue, I think, are very easy to dismiss in women.

More often than not, you’ll find us on the couch, in silence, each staring into a phone. Where’s the phone? Is it charged? Should I charge it now, or later? At work or at home, notifications buzz me like low-flying planes. I’m crossing the street, I’ll stop and look at the phone and have no idea what’s going on. I’m with my kids and I’m still touching the phone. More troubling is a sporadic buzzing I feel in my leg, which feels like a phone ringing, when the phone isn’t actually in my pocket. I’m a freelance producer, so if I’m out in the field and miss some key correspondence, an excuse of “Well, you see, my phone usage, it became a bit much” would merely be an efficient way to make sure I am never hired again. Then my “Dumb” phone failed to mount on my clever laptop, which meant loading music and podcasts became another hurdle to clear. To fly a 10-minute podcast on to the phone, Bluetooth wanted 25 minutes.

Symphony of the Seas – which, on its maiden voyage from Barcelona in March 2018 became the largest passenger ship ever built – is about five times the size of the Titanic. More than twenty-five million people set sail on a cruise liner in 2017.”Most people’s idea of a cruise is ‘Oh God, I’m going to be packed in with five thousand people I don’t want to talk to and getting bored out of my tree,” says Tom Wright, founder of WKK Architects, who has worked on cruise ships and land hotels. “Companies started to treat the cruise liner as a floating resort, rather than as a ship.” Consider: since the launch of the RMS Queen Elizabeth in 1940, the record for largest passenger ship had changed hands twice. The essential consideration when designing a cruise ship is flow of human traffic. Cruise ships are built using concurrent design: while the keel and lower hull are being cut, the top of the ship is still being laid out. Each Oasis-class ship costs more than $1 billion, not including the vast new cruise terminals Royal Caribbean built in Miami to hold them. In November 2017, before my visit to France, I flew to New York to see the future of cruise ship design. “We’re looking at how the infrastructure has been done on a cruise ship for the last 40 years, and we believe that there is the potential of doing drastically different things,” he said.

The Net isn’t terribly good as movies go, but it is more real, more current, than I suspected two decades ago. Our feelings about these changes were mirrored in the movies as fear and beguilement-a bunch of rubes trying to make sense of this darned technology eager to eat our minds. The internet is still eating our minds-and now, more than ever, the movies themselves. Dozens of recent movies dramatize the act of vanishing down the internet’s rabbit holes, into the gloss of a digitally manipulated life. The sequel to 2015’s slick, unnerving horror movie Unfriended will travel to the Dark Web, where the most ghoulish, Bitcoin-backed corners of the internet spring to life, and, eventually, bring death. All of these movies are products of a world that isn’t necessarily afraid of the internet-just obsessed with it. Movies about the consequences of the internet aren’t new, exactly. It has zapped movies of an inherent power-the ability to transport, to reinvent or recontextualize what’s possible in the world.

JD and Alibaba both plan to sell their systems to other retailers and are working on additional checkout technologies. At 120 of Walmart’s 4,700 American stores, shoppers can also scan items, including fruits and vegetables, using the camera on their smartphones and pay for them using the devices. New start-ups are seeking to give retailers the technology to compete with Amazon’s system. One of them, AiFi, is working on cashierless checkout technology that it says will be flexible and affordable enough that mom-and-pop retailers and bigger outlets can use it. “There’s a gold rush feeling about this,” said Alan O’Herlihy, chief executive of Everseen, an Irish company working with retailers on automated checkout technology that uses artificial intelligence. Retailers like Amazon could compile reams of data about where customers spend time inside their doors, comparable to what internet companies already know about their online habits. Depending on how heavily retailers automate in the years to come, job losses could be severe in a sector that has already experienced wave after wave of store closings by the likes of Macy’s, Toys “R” Us and Sears. Some traditional retailers are also skeptical about whether the sort of automation in Amazon Go can move to large stores.